


Rewriting Roles (Directors Cut Remix)

by tricksterquinn



Category: White Collar
Genre: Dirty Talk, F/M, Fantasy, M/M, Married Couple, Multi, Pillow Talk, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tricksterquinn/pseuds/tricksterquinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back before El knew him, Neal made a great prop for the Burkes' bedroom games. Now she thinks maybe her characterization of him needs reworking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rewriting Roles (Directors Cut Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teaotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Roleplay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/234132) by [Teaotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/pseuds/Teaotter). 



> Thank you to everyone who audienced, betaed, and listened to me through the process of this fic. You guys are seriously the best.

It was late when Peter got in, late enough that El had given up waiting up for him and had, in fact, just put down her book and turned off the bedside light to settle in when she heard him come in and greet Satchmo. She smiled to herself and waited till he came upstairs and paused just within the door of their bedroom.

"It's ok," she said, flicking the light back on and turning over to face him. "I'm awake."

Peter looked stricken. "Oh no, I'm sorry El, I didn't mean to wake you coming in!"

El smiled and shook her head. "Don't worry, I hadn't fallen asleep yet."

Peter came over to kiss her. She leaned up into him and smiled again as he pulled away.

"You're back even later than I expected. Long day at work?"

He sighed deeply, turning to the closet to hang up his jacket. "Yeah. Hughes wanted us to play nice with Violent Crime, but of course Neal just had to do things Neal’s way, so I spent half the night chasing him around the city and the other half cleaning up paperwork and getting talked to by Hughes. I didn’t even get a break for dinner until 9 o’clock." She sat up as he went in the bathroom, still grumbling about Neal’s constant need to break the rules.

He came back out to stand in front of the closet as she got out of bed. She came up behind him to wrap her arms around his waist. He stopped mid-rant and sighed deeply. "Sorry, hon. He just makes me so _frustrated_ sometimes."

El leaned her head against his shoulder blade and smiled fondly. "I know, Peter. But you're glad to have him too."

Peter's back moved against her chest as he sighed again. "Yeah," he admitted. "Yeah, I am."

El rested her head against his broad back while he unbuttoned his shirt and then helped him pull it off one shoulder and then the other. She pressed her cheek against his spine and breathed in his familiar, beloved scent while he unbuttoned his trousers. She got back into bed and he sat on the edge of it to finish taking off his trousers and to pull off his socks. She wrapped her arms around his neck from behind and leaned her cheek on his hair.

"Do you remember when...?" She trailed off, not sure how he would respond.

"Hm?" Peter answered absently, focused on tossing his socks into the hamper across the room.

El paused before she continued, scooting back to climb under the covers with Peter while she thought. They hadn't talked about this in a long time, the way Peter's voice used to drop when El donned the tuxedo and smooth mannerisms of Neal Caffrey, suspected serial forger. The way she would tuck her fingers at the base of his spine while they were out in bars or cafes in the LES and pull chairs out for him and compliment him extravagantly, and in the cab on the way home her hand would sneak under his skirt, creeping higher and higher up his thigh until they were necking like teenagers, heedless of the eyes of the cab driver, who she would flick an extra twenty with studied nonchalance. The way he would fumble trying to get his hands inside her trousers, desperate to get his hands on her. Or the time she met him in the front hallway as he arrived home from work, and smiled that smile full of diabolical promise as she sank down to her knees, pressing him against their front door and watching him through her lashes as he helplessly took her, 'Neal Caffrey's', mouth. After Neal was safely locked away behind bars and no longer a daily presence, a constant preoccupation, in Peter’s life, he slowly faded out of their bedroom too; the tuxedo slowly becoming just another set of menswear in her closet, the smirk and swagger slowly melding back into something softer, more naturally El. They would revisit it sometimes, glancingly, when Neal would send Peter a birthday card or on the anniversary of the day Peter finally had tracked him down and arrested him, but they haven't spoken of it since Neal resurfaced in their lives, not past that first day when El laughed and told Peter she knew he was thinking of letting Neal out on a leash. It's become another of those things they don't bring up because Peter is attached to his polite fictions and El loves him enough to let him have them when there is no reason not to.

Peter had reached over her and turned off the light by the time El shrugged to herself and barged on. Frequently that's the best way to handle emotions with Peter: bluntly and with no room for avoidance. She trailed her hand up his flank, over his hip and around to pet his belly and chest soothingly and started again. "Do you remember that first time, when I surprised you with the tuxedo and we went out to that little tapas place on East 5th?"

She knew Peter had gotten it when he tensed in her arms. They were spooning now, El snuggled up against Peter's back, chin tucked on his shoulder and voice warm and soft and low in his ear. She paused for a moment, continuing to stroke his torso while she waited for the small nod that meant yes, he remembered, yes he'd let her do this, yes they are going there.

"Well..." Now she hesitated, considered for a moment how to say what had been on a slow simmer in the back of her mind for some time now.

Peter shifted nervously under her stilled hands. "Is it a problem now, El?"

"No, no, it's not that," she assured him, resuming her slow strokes up and down his torso. "It's just that... Well, now that I really know Neal, I think I might have gotten some of it wrong, is all."

Peter pulled away to turn and look at her, and even in the dark she knew he was making that disbelieving face of his. "Wait, you're worried you _mischaracterized_ Neal Caffrey when pretending to be him in bed?" El loves the way Peter can sound so completely scandalized while recounting the plain truth.

"Well… Yes," she admitted, pulling Peter back into her arms. "It was the Neal the Bureau had a file on, the one who kept slipping through your fingers. Not the Neal we know now, who hates beer and loves my cornish hens and walks Satchmo." 'The one you caught,' she didn't say.

She had thought about this a lot since Neal entered their lives for real. She felt very weird about it at first, strange and more than a little guilty as she got to know Neal, real Neal, the Neal who was brilliant and flawed and _theirs_ , and considered how in some ways she had used him as a prop in her bedroom games. It was only exacerbated by seeing the way other women used him; it made her so angry to see this wonderful man played with that way. Finally she'd realized how fiercely protective she felt of him for his own sake, not just Peter's, and not just out of guilt. She thought, hoped, that maybe that equalized things a bit.

"He's just so different than I thought back then," she continued, thinking of June and Mozzie and the way Neal looked at Peter and smiled at her, the way he was tweaked by Diana and tolerated by Jones.

Peter snorted, drawing breath to say something, but El preempted him by drawing a hand down over his hip as she added, "Sexier."

Peter froze. El was glad her grin was hidden in the covering darkness. She loved when she managed to shock him after all this time. It really never got old.

"El..." Peter murmured, voice dropping. "El, we can't... I shouldn't..."

El smiled against the back of his neck, because despite his attempt at a protest, Peter's breath was already speeding up and his muscles had tightened as if to stop him from pushing back against her. "Really?" she teased. "You're telling me you aren't interested?" Sliding her hand to cup his dick, already hardening, put the immediate lie to that one. Of course.

Peter groaned and dropped his head back against her forehead. "Of course I'm interested. You know I'm interested. But that doesn’t mean...”

El caught Peter's ear between her teeth to shut him up before he worked himself into a full-fledged freakout over the idea of his own attraction to Neal. It worked, of course. Mrs Peter Burke was no dummy.

"Honey," El spoke directly into Peter's ear, voice quiet enough that he had to listen closely despite her proximity, "I'm going to go back over that night, and I'm going to tell you how it would have gone if it had been the real Neal instead of my version of the FBI's Neal. Okay?" She stroked light fingertips over his thigh, forcing herself not to touch him directly again until he'd nodded shakily, exhaling harshly.

"Well," she started, still low and so close to his throat, "You'd've been at the bar, after a hard day of thwarting criminals…   ” And she jerked Peter off slow, in a way which managed to be both sure and uncertain (so like Neal), fingers playing down over his balls, his thighs, and catching under the head of his dick. She murmured in Peter’s ear about the way Neal looked in a well-cut suit, leaning over a bar, the way his eyes lit up when they caught on something shiny. She knew Peter was thinking of how Neal eyed a pretty girl, or possibly a work of art, but she was thinking of how she sometimes caught him looking at Peter.

“He’d sidle up to the bar next to you and order something ridiculous. After a while he’d catch your eye and start chatting. What would it be like for him to turn all that charm on you full blast? Almost too smug, except for that little bit of insecurity barely visible around the edges of his so-suave mask, uncertain that you’re interested .”

Peter snorted at that, doubting the idea that Neal would feel any such uncertainty and El smiled to herself, thinking again of the way that Neal's eyes follow Peter, the way Neal worked so hard for Peter's approval, how he tugged at the leash Peter held but only enough to test Peter's grip, to make it a game. She didn’t mention this to Peter. Peter would work things out in his own time, or he wouldn't, but there was no benefit to panicking him for no reason. 

“You’d show off - you couldn’t resist proving you weren’t just whatever he’d pegged you as, law-enforcement manly man, closeted and straightforward - and so you’d pick something to talk about that he wouldn’t expect, art or wine or jazz, and he’d be so surprised, impressed and delighted, that he’d let the practiced polished shell crack. You’d be rewarded by that boyish glee he gets about the things he loves best, that normally strangers never get to see, and maybe after a while he’d invite you back to his place to listen to his record collection. You wouldn’t really get around to it, though.”

Of course that's the thing that gets Peter really going, the idea of that genuine Neal inviting him home, of that Neal fumbling and gasping, hands everywhere, while Peter interrupted his helpless stream of babble to kiss him again and again.

“He’d talk excitedly about Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington all the way up the stairs while you follow him and don’t let yourself kiss him until you get inside his apartment. Then you do kiss him, just jumping him and crowding him back against the door until it clicks shut behind him and you slide your teeth down his neck until he’s fumbling at your clothes, desperate to touch you everywhere." El pictured it, stroking Peter the way she knew he loved, firm and just this side of too-tight: Neal rubbing up against Peter’s thigh while his so so clever fingers skitter and rub over Peter's dick and Peter growls in his ear until at last Neal's stream of words is reduced to gasping Peter’s name and then just gasping and shuddering against Peter.

"He'd come apart for you. You wouldn't even make it to the bed, he'd be so into it."

And this, oh, this got Peter in a way that the idea of Caffrey on his knees for Agent Burke just never did, effective as it was at the time. El kept murmuring in Peter's ear as his breathing got louder and more ragged, how Neal would look at Peter with wonder, would press open-mouthed kisses against Peter’s throat and murmur absurd endearments while jerking Peter off as if all he wanted in the world was to wring every last groan and gasp possible from Peter. Peter leaned back into her, hips jerking forward into her hand with increasing urgency, until he cut her off, pulling her half on top of him to kiss her desperately as he came messily all over them both.

After, they lay there breathing one another’s air until Peter’s breath had evened back out. El pulled away eventually, reluctantly, to pull off her nightshirt, no longer wearable, and use it to clean Peter off.

“Sorry, hon,” he said, sheepish and already relaxing toward sleep. “Do you want...?”

She wadded the shirt up and tossed it off the edge of the bed to deal with in the morning. “Shhh, Peter. Go to sleep.”

El snuggled back down next to her husband and pulled the blankets back up over them. He turned to curl around her and mumbled into her shoulder, “You sure?”

El tried not to laugh. “Yes, Peter,” she said, interlacing her fingers between his, “I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Peter muttered. “If you’re sure.”

El gave up and laughed, kissing his temple before settling in and closing her eyes.


End file.
